In the grand narrative of the Latter-day Saint settlement of the West, certain figures loom large: Brigham Young, Parley P. Pratt, and the thousands of Mormon pioneers who made the desert blossom as a rose. Native figures in this story often appear as either obstacles to be overcome or as Lamanite brethren waiting for redemption. Max Perry Mueller’s Wakara’s America: The Life and Legacy of a Native Founder of the American West offers a necessary intervention and complication to this familiar story. His central thesis is bold: the Ute leader Wakara, far from being a peripheral character, “should be counted among the founding fathers of the American West,” a man whose influence and empire-building were comparable to that of his contemporary and rival, Brigham Young (p. 9).

What immediately sets Wakara’s America apart is its unique approach to storytelling. Mueller eschews a traditional, linear biography. Instead, he frames the entire narrative around a historical mystery: who stole Wakara’s skull from his mountain tomb nearly two decades after his death? This question becomes a powerful metaphor for Wakara’s broader erasure from the historical record. From there, the book unfolds not chronologically, but thematically, exploring the core relationships that defined Wakara’s world: his people’s connection to the fish of the Timpanogous (Utah) Lake ecosystem, his mastery of the horse (and considerable skill as a horse thief), and his brutal trade of Paiutes as slaves. This structure is a deliberate methodological choice, an attempt to write history in a more Indigenous mode—one that is spatial, relational, and cyclical rather than linear. As Mueller puts it, “the past and the present touch and inform each other,” and his storytelling attempts to bridge the two (p. 13). It forces the reader to see the West not as an empty wilderness awaiting pioneers, but as a complex ecosystem of relations where land, animals, and competing human powers were in constant negotiation, both before and after the arrival of the Latter-day Saints (and even to the present day).

For a Latter-day Saint audience, the book’s historical claims are both challenging and essential. Mueller presents Wakara as a figure of immense complexity—neither a simple villain nor a noble savage. He was a shrewd strategist who used the arrival of the Latter-day Saints to expand his own Native empire, directing settlers to the lands of his Ute rivals and turning their new towns into markets for his trade in stolen horses and enslaved captives. At the same time, he was a fierce defender of Indigenous sovereignty who fought back when settler encroachment threatened his people’s resources and way of life, which led Mueller to state that “as a defender of Native territory and certain Native lives, Wakara deserves to be counted among the greatest Native American leaders” (p. 10).

Perhaps most provocatively, Mueller reframes the 1853–54 conflict traditionally known as the “Walker War.” Drawing on largely forgotten settler women’s journals and modern forensic evidence from a mass grave unearthed in Nephi, Utah, he argues the conflict was, in fact, “Brigham’s War”—a calculated campaign of aggression planned years earlier and instigated by Brigham Young to eliminate his chief rival for control of the Great Basin. Mueller traces this pattern of “inverted conquest,” where the aggressor rewrites history to cast himself as the victim, back to the Puritan ancestors of Brigham Young himself in King Philip’s War. The book does not shy away from the darkest corners of this history, offering an unflinching look at the Latter-day Saints’ role in the regional slave trade—a system they entered under the guise of benevolence but which Mueller exposes as a cover for exploitation of Native bodies.   

The book’s engagement with themes of colonialism is direct and sustained, with repeated discussions of “rematriation”—a concept Mueller defines as restoring a people’s sacred relationship with their ancestral lands on their own terms. Such themes are prominent in modern scholarship, and some readers may be familiar with the more abrasive and unsettling decolonial frameworks found in the works of anthropologists like Jason Palmer, whose work on Peruvian Mormonism seeks to actively unravel colonial regimes. (Palmer’s book, Forever Familias: Race, Gender, and Indigeneity in Peruvian Mormonism, was so aggressive in its efforts to force decolonization narratives down your throat that I couldn’t make it through the first couple of chapters before I put it down, never to pick it up again, even as a relatively liberal Latter-day Saint.) Mueller’s work, while just as intellectually rigorous, is more accessible. By embedding his critique within a compelling, mystery-driven narrative, he invites the reader into a “moral reimagining” rather than a purely academic deconstruction. He implicates himself and his non-Native readers in this difficult history, not to assign guilt, but to argue for a shared responsibility to do better than our ancestors.   

Ultimately, Wakara’s America is a landmark text. It succeeds in solving the mystery of Wakara’s stolen skull, connecting the theft to the rise of scientific racism and the government-sanctioned collection of Native remains to “prove” their inferiority. But its greater achievement is its restoration of a founder to his rightful place in the story of the American West. For Latter-day Saints, this is not an easy history, but it is a necessary one. It dismantles the myth of a vacant Zion. It replaces it with a more complex, more truthful, and ultimately more human story of a land shaped by the competing ambitions of two formidable leaders, Brigham Young and Wakara.

For more book reviews and forthcoming books, see Mormon Studies Books in 2025.